The Immoralist
them. Not so much neglecting my mind therefore, as allowing it to lie fallow, I gave myself up to the luxurious enjoyment of my own self, of external things, of all existence, which seemed to me divine. We had left Syracuse, and as I ran along the precipitous road that connects Taormina with Mola, I remember shouting aloud, as if my calling could bring him to me: "A new self! A new self!"
My only effort then—an effort which was at that time constant—consisted in systematically contemning and suppressing everything which I believed I owed to my past education and early moral beliefs. Deliberately disdainful of my learning, and in scorn of my scholar's tastes, I refused to visit Agrigentum, and a few days later, on the road to Naples, I passed by the beautiful temple of Pæstum, in which Greece still breathes, and where, two years later, I went to worship some God or other—I no longer know which.
Why do I say 'my only effort'? How could I be interested in myself save as a perfectible being? Never before had my will been so tensely strung as in striving after this unknown and vaguely imagined perfection. I employed the whole of my will indeed, in strengthening and bronzing my body. We had left the coast near Salerno and reached Ravello. There,
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